I found an op-ed in the June 22 paper (“Enjoying summer in Maine? You may have Israel to thank.”) offensive.

I followed expert reports quite closely in the 18 months it took for distinguished national diplomats to gather and negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) limiting Iran’s nuclear program. As has been described in many accounts about the effort, it was often touch and go right up until the end when the agreement was signed and implemented.

What it accomplished was closing off all pathways in any Iranian effort, real or imagined, to acquire a nuclear weapon. Iran’s intentions, distorted and grossly exaggerated in the op-ed, were proscribed by the agreement requiring Iran to dispossess nearly all of its stock of low-level enriched uranium, permanently disable the Arak Plutonium reactor, remove centrifuges, set up a monitoring system in its nuclear labs and submit to the most intrusive inspection regime ever imposed on any nation by the other signatories of the JCPOA.

Iran complied with these requirements with very few deviations, as reported by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The plan immediately relieved pressure in the region and was almost universally accepted as a historic and useful agreement.

That was even the case with the Israeli Atomic Energy Agency, several prominent Israeli former military and intelligence officials. Other Israeli high officials, primarily Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his close associates, of course objected and spent a great deal of effort and money lobbying against it, lobbying mostly to the American public and the Republican Party. Similar distortions to those used in that campaign to disparage Iran were repeated in the offensive June 22 op-ed.

It should be understood about Iran that, while the mullahs and religious officials make life terrible for many of the country’s 90 million people, it has been a longtime signatory to both international prohibitions against the use of chemical weapons and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

For the Iranian government to also sign onto the deeply intrusive and significant restrictions included in the JCPOA is a testament not only to the diplomacy that concluded the agreement, but importantly to the rational thinking on behalf of the Iranian leadership.

The op-ed painted an entirely different and, in my opinion, racist, demonizing, inaccurate picture of the Iranian decision-makers. This is not accepting of the regime’s public record we in the West find in many ways intolerable, but an example of diplomacy that appeals to rational choices that even regimes like Iran’s, or North Korea’s, have to make to function in our fractious but still intertwined world.

With regard to why Iran has been lobbing missiles at Israel, Iran did what any rational government would do when its national sovereignty and territory is attacked, which is what Israel did by attacking and destroying its embassy in Lebanon.

One of the gross distortions in the piece was the unsubstantiated claim that Iran’s “breakout” time was “days,” not the year or more most experts refer to when speaking about a potential Iranian bomb. The claim Iran would not use a nuclear weapon as a deterrent but offensively is a complete fabrication, one of the earlier distortions voiced repeatedly in the campaign to scuttle the JCPOA.

Iran negotiated in good faith in 2015 and to say it wasn’t in good faith in 2025 with the Trump administration is pure speculation, given Iran’s involvement in other international efforts to limit weapons of mass destruction.

I am very offended by any insinuation that Iran is genocidal, having watched as Israel has bombed Gaza and its inhabitants into rubble, committing what most of the world recognizes as a genocide. The chutzpah to make that comparison very much offends me.